Bad News for Big Brains

Bad News for Big Brains

With big brains comes big intelligence, or so the hypothesis goes. But there may be trade-offs as well. Humans and other creatures with large brains relative to their body size tend to have smaller guts and possibly fewer offspring. Scientists have debated for decades whether the two phenomena are related. Now a team of researchers says that they are—and that big brains do indeed make us smart. The finding comes thanks to an unusual experiment reported at the Evolution Ottawa evolutionary biology meeting in which scientists shrank and grew the brains of guppies over several generations.